1
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.Federico Fellini
2
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.Federico Fellini
3
When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.Federico Fellini
4
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.Federico Fellini
5
If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.Federico Fellini
6
I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.Federico Fellini
7
No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.Federico Fellini
8
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.Federico Fellini
9
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.Federico Fellini
10
You see me in my most virile moment when you see me doing what I do. When I am directing a special energy comes upon me.... It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.Federico Fellini
11
When I do things without any explanation but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right.Federico Fellini
12
Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear the same self-doubts .. . and I have only one source on which I can draw because it comes from within me.Federico Fellini
13
Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.Federico Fellini
14
I think that one can have luck if one tries to create an atmosphere of spontaneity.Federico Fellini
15
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.Federico Fellini
16
Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear the same self-doubts ... and I have only one source on which I can draw because it comes from within me.Federico Fellini
17
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.Federico Fellini
18
A different language is a different vision of life.Federico Fellini
19
You exist only in what you do.Federico Fellini
20
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.Federico Fellini
21
Experience is what you get while looking for something else.Federico Fellini
22
Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.Federico Fellini
23
When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.Federico Fellini
24
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.Federico Fellini
25
Censorship is advertising paid by the government.Federico Fellini
26
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.Federico Fellini
27
My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness, you realise that you are not the boss. It is the other way around.Federico Fellini